Diverse Thinkers Fuel Innovations

A few years ago I attended a public lecture on diversity by Frijof Capra, who is one of the main popularizers of my field of complex systems studies. Someone (not just any someone, a professor of mine) asked the following question during the Q/A session after the lecture: What role, if any, do you feel people who process information very differently from the norm play in the larger context of things? Capra's answer was that different ways of processing the world, radically different ways of thinking, were very important, especially to innovation. Naturally, I remember liking this exchange quite a lot.

June's monthly newsletter "Business $ense" from the Office of Disability Employment Policy is an article called Innovative Thinkers, Innovative Solutions. The article discusses exactly this same idea of diverse thinkers being needed for diverse ideas, only more concretely.

What powered these ideas [text messaging, Segways] was innovative thinking--the same kind of thinking that drives business success. To effectively compete, businesses of all sizes need employees who can think outside of the proverbial box, especially in today's difficult economic environment. And more and more employers are discovering a ready source for such talent--people with disabilities. On a daily basis, people with disabilities must think divergently about how to tackle challenges and get things done. At work, this translates into innovation.

The article also touches on universal design.

There are a lot of ways in which processing the world very differently from the others can make life more difficult, but there are also a lot of ways, like being able to find solutions to problems that more conventional thinkers are unable to see, in which processing the world very differently from others can benefit everyone.